We are young, and we read. This seems to require more explanation than it should.
There is a peculiar condescension in the way Gen Z is sometimes addressed: everything must be shorter, louder, easier to swallow. We would like a little more credit. We have questions that take longer than thirty seconds to answer, and we are willing to sit with an idea that asks something of us.
Much of our understanding of the world comes from the same newspapers and magazines our parents read. We admire their writers, argue with their conclusions, and send their articles to one another with increasingly long accompanying messages. We wanted to make something of our own, too. A place where our questions could help determine the conversation.
That is why we started Nothing Personal Journal.
We want rigorous writing, thoughtful disagreement, and sentences worth returning to. We want writers who check their facts and examine their assumptions, including the assumptions that make an argument particularly satisfying. Speaking truth to power requires taking the truth seriously. The people we admire should expect difficult questions from us, too.
Our interests are broad because our lives are broad. We will write about politics, culture, books, films, friendship, desire, and whatever else we find ourselves unable to stop thinking about. Sometimes an essay will offer an argument. Sometimes it will make a familiar feeling newly legible. Both can change the way a person moves through the world.
And yes, we will write about the guy you keep wanting to text.
You can be worried about your country and still spend an embarrassing portion of the evening wondering whether someone misses you. Both thoughts fit inside an ordinary Tuesday. A publication interested in how people live ought to have room for that.
We want to pay attention to people with the same care we give to ideas. There is a person on the other side of the opinion, the photograph, the terrible first impression. We want writing that gets close enough to notice the details a label leaves out. Curiosity can make a judgment more exact. It can also make us reconsider one.
Gen Z is where we are writing from. Anyone who wants to read, think, question, or join the conversation belongs here. You do not need the right degree, the right vocabulary, or an opinion ready for every occasion. We hope you will sometimes arrive unsure and leave with a better question.
This journal is a place for everything we keep trying to talk about, including the things we have not yet found the words for.
We called it Nothing Personal. We expect quite a lot of it will be.
